The Role of Feelings in Your Manifesting

From his new book, Wishes Fulfilled, author Dr. Wayne Dyer shares how you can change your destiny with an "I am" attitude.

The following excerpt is taken from the book Wishes Fulfilled by Dr. Wayne Dyer. It is published by Hay House (Available Feb. 28, 2012) and available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com.

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To put it as plain and simple as I know how to make it: no assumption of the feeling of the wish fulfilled, no fulfillment of your wishes. In other words, it is absolutely imperative to learn how to assume, in your imagination, the feeling of already having and being what you desire. Your thoughts are without form. If we could find a location in space for these thoughts, they would be in your head—but your head has boundaries, and your thoughts do not have boundaries, so they could reside anywhere or nowhere.

You choose the thought that you prefer, from the trillions of thoughts that continuously flow through your mind on that never-ending conveyer belt. You can pick one that suits you, put it back, and take another at any time. Your imagination is the repository of thoughts that you opt to keep. Your feelings, on the other hand, are experienced in your body—the place where you do all of your living in this corporeal material world. Your feelings play more of a role in your life than you realize.

In order to learn something intellectually, you engage in the practice of mental discipline: studying, researching, memorizing facts, cogitating, participating in discussions, and seeking expert opinions. Ultimately you draw conclusions about what you’ve been analyzing. You know the facts and are confident you’ve mastered the subject through the thinking process.

Knowing something spiritually is a very different matter altogether. Here you can cogitate, ruminate, and analyze endlessly without accessing any more enlightened awareness of what you are studying. In order to know something spiritually, you must experience it, there is no other way—you cannot simply think your way to a new awareness. You must experience it, and the only vehicles you have for directly experiencing a new and higher vision for yourself are your feelings. What does it feel like in your body?

You may have placed a picture in your imagination of who you’d like to be, but if you can’t assume the feeling of that wish fulfilled, you’ll find it impossible to make your future dream a present fact. Yet you do have this wondrous power to take a thought that is in your imagination, live from that place in your daily life, and then experience in your body exactly how that feels and stay with this feeling. These words I am now channeling for you are among the most important you will read in this book, and perhaps in your entire lifetime. Your feelings are where you live. If you have been able to assume the feeling within your heart and genuinely feel the love that this activity brings to you, you will, as Neville states, be in a place where your wish must be realized—such is the power of your feelings.

Years ago, while teaching at several major universities, I’d ask graduate students this question: “What do you respond to first—what you know, or how you feel?” I wanted them to determine which domain captured their primary attention. For instance, on the cognitive level—their analyzing ability, mathematical prowess, mastery of the rhyming scheme of an Elizabethan sonnet, or ability to memorize scientific formulas. On the feeling level—loneliness, sadness, fear, heartbreak, anxiety, love, ecstasy, joy, and so on. All reported that the feeling level was primary.

You most likely will agree that how you feel takes precedence over what you know—effect rules over cognition. Formal educational experiences, however, are almost exclusively devoted to the “what you know” aspect of your being. I’m suggesting you assume an entirely new approach. I want you to get the full brunt of the message that the assumption of feeling of the wish fulfilled will bring home to you.

Here is Neville Goddard, speaking on this subject in 1944:

Every feeling makes a subconscious impression and, unless it is counteracted by a more powerful feeling of an opposite nature, must be expressed. The dominant of two feelings is the one expressed. I am healthy is a stronger feeling than I will be healthy. To feel I will be is to confess I am not; I am is stronger than I am not. What you feel you are always dominates what you feel you would like to be; therefore, to be realized, the wish must be felt as a state that is rather than a state that is not.